


Scarab

by omg_okimhere



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-21
Updated: 2017-09-21
Packaged: 2018-12-30 06:39:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12102927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omg_okimhere/pseuds/omg_okimhere
Summary: Unwelcome memories return to Drake.





	Scarab

Tap, tap…scrape.

Tap, tap…scrape.

Tap, tap…scrape.

On the outside of the pane, slow, steady rivulets of rain stream down, a bathing from an all-day-grey sky.  Inside, a beetle, trapped against the glass in the darkened room and seeking the light, tries again and again with its reverse-jointed legs to climb to freedom.

Tap, tap…scrape.

Too simple of a life form to realize futility, it butts repeatedly into the smooth surface with dull determination, its iridescent blue-black shell hard enough on impact to add to the skittering noise.

Tap, tap…scrape.

Tumbler in hand, Bennet watches the insect as dusk gathers and shadows deepen.  Too weary of life to rise and light the lamp, he sits in silence, sipping his whiskey, his thoughts drifting along dark pathways, lured there by the stout-bodied arthropod and its incessant tapping.

In his mind’s eye he sees the other scarab, the pale green amulet worn by the holy man in the tent outside El Teb.  There was no rain that night, only the arid stillness of the dunes and the anguished turmoil in his soul.  The ticking of the tiny legs on his windowsill echoes the scratching of the skin writer as he primed his needle under the North African stars so long ago.

Bennet’s nostrils flare with the remembrance of pungent smoke and ash – the many-scented offerings made on the priest’s altar of brass and lapis.  Inside his skull, he hears again the cadence of incantations spoken in strange tongues – whispered to the moon, keened into the heavens – long beyond the midnight hour.

His fingers move unbidden to his opposite arm, tracing the places, as his consciousness recreates the prick of the hot steel point.  He came away in the dawn with a talisman painted on his body, a ward against the things he kept seeing, the things he wished no more to see.  Even now, he can sense them out there, waiting to return, scratching at the glass to get back inside his mind – the horrors of the blood-soaked sands, the wraiths of a thousand men and more, fading in and out, floating along the misty edges of memory.

He drifts within this netherworld until, in time, the trance slips and Bennet returns with a shiver to the present, cold perspiration trickling down from his hairline to moisten his collar.

Tap, tap…scrape.

 _Crush it._ He wants to crush it all – the bloody beetle, the noise in his head, the savage images that strum his nerves like a poorly tuned oud.  Soft footfalls sound behind him and a figure glides into the room, the apparition pausing to put match to wick on the hurricane lamp beside him.  He does not turn.

For the better part of twenty minutes Francine has searched for him; finding him here is a relief.  She notes the tension in the way Bennet is holding himself, in the grip of his knuckles around his half-drunk nightcap.  Wordlessly, she steps close, cradling his sweat-damp head against her breast.

“What is it, my love?” she queries, brushing his temple with her lips.

“Ghosts.  Ancient ghosts.”  His voice is but a croak.

Francine feels again the hollow, helpless knot in her heart, the desperate wish to take from him the things she can never know nor understand.

“Would that I could exorcise your demons,” she murmurs softly, a tear forming to fall and mix with his hair pomade and the weeping of his pores.

Enfolding her onto his lap as his own eyes fill, Bennet clings to her like a man besieged, until the swirling spectres recede, until the past haunts him no more that night.

 

**Author's Note:**

> An oud is an Egyptian stringed instrument


End file.
